1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a device for storing data in digital form, and particularly to a device capable of indicating the kind of digital data to be stored.
2. Description of Related Art
Digital data storage devices are known for storing both voice digital data and image digital data. For example, a facsimile machine equipped with an automatic telephone message recorder (automatically answering telephone) is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,018,186 and Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 1-286671, in which image data are received by the facsimile machine and voice data are received by the automatically answering telephone. The received data are stored in a data storage device provided in the facsimile machine.
In such a storage device, problems occur at any time when both voice digital data and image digital data are stored into the device. For example, they occur in a case where a facsimile machine having an automatically answering machine is used after being further connected to an automatically answering telephone. When the facsimile machine having the automatically answering machine is connected to the automatically answering telephone, the facsimile machine is regarded as having two telephones. In this case, for example when the facsimile machine having the automatically answering machine is located in a study and the automatically answering telephone is located at a different location, the following advantage can be obtained. That is, image digital data transmitted from an external source can be received by the facsimile machine in the study and a telephone call can be caught at either one of the two different places. However, in this case, the automatically answering telephone is generally designed to have a voice data storage device and, thus, it can store voice digital data. Accordingly, it is inefficient to doubly store the voice digital data into a voice data storage device which is equipped in the facsimile machine having the automatically answering machine.
Further, there occurs a disadvantage when the facsimile machine having the automatically answering machine is used alone. For example, when a storage device cannot be used exclusively for storage of image digital data although the user knows that a large amount of image digital data will be transmitted to the facsimile machine during his/her absence and the whole storage area of the data storage device must be used to store the image digital data, the storage area is reduced in the reception of the image digital data by the automatically answering machine of the facsimile machine. Thus, a desired amount of image digital data cannot be received. The same disadvantage occurs for the case where a large number of voice message or a large amount of voice data is expected and images messages are received.